Lucky Dogs hold a Zen quintessence that can only be approximated by the sobriquet "Bourbon Street Steak," and are oddly more satisfying than Café du Monde beignets and chicory coffee in invoking memories of New Orleans and her pleasures.
Are Lucky Dogs, therefore, our petite Madeleine dipped in tea? Proust's ghost will not say, for now is discretion, and these are our memories, after all.
Historian Jerry Strahan has had a very American career. He is a respected and indeed famous and authoritative scholar of military history, but like many a family man needed to provide for his brood with a higher cash flow than itinerant academic leavings would provide, and fell into managing the Lucky Dog operation through those twin hands, fate and opportunity surrounded by less appealing alternatives. Over the decades he grew into the job, and even expanded the operation to Washington, D.C., where I was a happy customer.
Strahan's academic career is only a leitmotif in "Managing Ignatius: The Lunacy of Lucky Dogs and Life in New Orleans" for he places the characters of the vendors he deals with and his colorful memories front and center. For those not in the know, the "Ignatius" of the title is the immortal character of John Kennedy Toole's "Confederacy of Dunces" who has a comic scene selling weenies from a push wagon that is possibly one of the greatest memorable pieces of character and action reinforcing each other in American literature. To describe this scene as classic damns it with faint praise, for it simultaneously captures the character, the city, the soul, comedy, and tragedy in a single sustained breath. It should be a tattoo, and no American high school student should be unfamiliar with it.
And the primary emphasis of "Managing Ignatius" story is that Strahan works with many who are at the margins of employability, yet have personalities that draw you. "Managing Ignatius" therefore should serve as a management science alternative textbook, for indeed Strahan's goal is to sell weenies with a volatile cast and crew. He makes many bricks with very little straw.
Yet, there is a very tender side to his memoir, for Strahan never deprecates nor condemns even the most fricative people he must motivate. Indeed, he often observes that some of his most prickly characters end up being the best and most enduring vendors, and acknowledges that in an odd way many of them have found their calling in life, just as Strahan has found his.
This is an excellent, amusing, informative book that commands attention on multiple levels, and is not simply for tourists of New Orleans or Toole fans. For the story Strahan tells here is like our own as even the soul has a journey in life. In "Managing Ignatius" Strahan tells that story and "...the result of all our travels will be to arrive back where we started, and know it for the very first time." (T.S. Eliot)
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